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I guess my big issue with the book world is that only rarely does anybody address the physicality of books, as if to do so is somehow an insult to “words,” which is kind of corny, and seems almost willfully self-blinding. The extreme is in France, where most covers are blank with just the title and author’s name, which is actually not a bad idea, like school uniforms, but then what next — all books set in the same font at the same size? A war between the pro italics and the anti italics camp? I think you can go too far.

In 1996 there was a global paper shortage, and even Rupert Murdoch had to fly to Finland to ensure paper supplies for his publishing divisions. In second-hand book stores you can sometimes recognize the 1996 and 1997 books because they’ve turned yellow from the high acid content of the paper.

Thinking about this yellowness got me to thinking about pulp which got me to thinking about how precious we are about books. Books are central to the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. At least for now. Smart people have argued that we’re going to look back on paper (and the book) as intermediate technologies, stops on the road to the all-digital universe. This seems wacky right now, but in 1,000 years it won’t seem wacky at all. One way or another, books will cease to exist. They’ll either be supplanted or humanity will become extinct or — well, whatever scenario you envisage.

So back to pulp. Back to paper. My cousin in Ontario is an entomologist, and so I think about insects more than I might think about them otherwise. I got to thinking about how wasps and hornets make paper, too, and paper is, in its own way, just as vital to the survival of their species as it is for us. What if you could trick wasps into using human paper to make their own paper? What if you took a stack of Finnegan’s Wakes and pulped them with hot water and corn syrup and left the whole thing in a pasture and let wasps come and gather the cellulose to make nests? What if you added pigment to the chopped up paper, and tricked the wasps into making nests in designer pastel shades — in candy stripes or tie-dyed patterns?

• People who phone in to listener phone-in shows are invariably nuts, but the show’s producers always say, “No, we always get really nice, smart callers on our show,” and are so shocked when only whack-jobs call.

• People will walk up to you with an X-ray of their skull and say, “I don’t have a brain. See? Here’s my evidence.” And it turns out they really don’t have one. It happens, apparently … instead of brains they have a thin tissue lining their skull’s interior that is, it would seem, all one really needs to get along in the world.

• Try to memorize your interviewer’s name. Don’t write it down on a sheet of paper and refer to it. I did this once at an AM radio station in Ottawa during an early morning interview (which I shouldn’t have done in the first place), and the interviewer was so insulted that he’s made a career out of telling people about that one dumb interview in 1991, still, nearly a decade and a half later. Remember: one interview you don’t even remember can become the pivotal anecdote in a stranger’s life.

• Germans refuse to stand in line for anything, and if you tell them to line up at, say, a book signing, they start taunting you and calling you a fascist. This is true. Ask any author who’s ever read there.

• Europeans ask the rudest questions, with bad punctuation and grammar (“Douglas, what do you think if I say to you, that you be the failure of the universe?”) When you tell them they’re being rude, they play dumb.

• The factory that made Tums mints in St. Louis was kitty-corner from the world’s biggest, Barton-Finkiest hotel with half-mile-long hallways, and it also sold Red Skelton clown paintings in the lobby.

German Language Tour Diary from 2001

Hamburg Day One

I went to feed the ducks and birds on the Alster lake just off the Kennedybrücke. None of them came, but when I took a Polaroid, the flashbulb attracted them as if it were bread. I used to think that the future was California, but now I think the future is Germany.

Lots of press and not much time to walk around.

European book tours are so odd because they happen so many years after you write THE END on a manuscript. In one sense your book is so totally in the past that you find yourself going crazy having to discuss it. But then at the same time you have a distance that can also more clearly illuminate the motive behind the work. North American critics always assume fiction is thinly veiled biography. Europeans don’t do this. Americans ask, “What does this book tell us about the REAL Douglas Coupland?” In Europe they ask, “What does this book tell us about the world?” Either way, I am so sick of discussing myself, and I truly believe that answering too many questions over and over damages the soul.Read more…

I think the most common set-decorating error in films these days can be reduced to one word: Helvetica. I’ll be watching a World War I drama, and there at a train station in the background is a sign saying ”Ypres” in 200-point Helvetica Bold. Movie over — at least for me. Once I see Helvetica in any pre-1957 movie, all I can think is that the art director was so clueless he either used Helvetica in a historical drama, or hired someone stupid enough to do so, and never double-checked the work.

In art school I studied typography for several years. This was pre-Macintosh, and we had to draw fonts by hand using gouache, including numbers and diacritical marks. In 1982 there were maybe 50,000 people in North America who knew what kerning is. Today, my 10-year-old nephew knows what it is.

Typography has been massively democratized and has now done more wonderful things in 10 years than in the hundreds preceding it. I remember my type instructor, Greg, moaning, “Typography is over. Nothing new will ever happen with type ever again. Why do we even bother waking up in the morning?” I note that the moment you hear somebody say something’s over, it usually means that something massive is about to happen. Francis Fukuyama, meet Osama bin Laden and discuss the end of history.

In the world of type, Helvetica was the supposed endpoint of design. It was designed to be 100-percent emotionally neutral (yes, how Swiss, the same country that brought us sleeping pills — Helvetica is the Latin name for Switzerland), and when it was marketed in 1961, it caused a revolution, because everything the font touched it modernized. Helvetica essentially takes any word or phrase and pressure-washes it into sterility. I love it. So does Panasonic, BASF, Bayer, American Airlines, PanAm, Lufthansa, BellSouth, Hapag-Lloyd and any number of other firms that use it for their logos and as their house font.

When I began writing fiction, I was naturally curious about the relationship of words on a page and how the words look on a page. By 1995 I began experimenting freely with the “lookfeel” of words in my novel, “Microserfs.” In it I had pages of words that did and didn’t correlate to the main narrative. I did these in Helvetica. The book dealt with people who work at Microsoft (who developed their own Helvetica clone, the cheesy wannabe Arial) and I was wondering, well, if machines daydream, what would their daydreams look like? And so I did these pages, an extended example of which I present here.

Somebody sent me a case of champagne today — Freixenet, lovely! — but there was no card attached. The importer/distributor said there might have been one but, “It probably got lost in customs, and Bev can’t find the packing slip, so you’re out of luck.” Thanks. We should all have such problems, but the fact of the matter is there’s a person out there somewhere on the planet who’s sitting by their phone or e-mailbox waiting for a thank-you message, and I don’t have any idea who that person is. So I have to go through the next year knowing that with each passing day, someone is hating me more and more and more until it ultimately ends up in, yes, tears.

Champagne seems to be today’s theme. Here’s how: I’ve begun a new sculpture that came about in an odd way via champagne. An arts magazine interviewer and I had been began discussing the notions of safety and what makes you feel safe — with Joseph Beuys, gray blankets and fat kept him alive through the winters. With me, growing up, it was an old staircase, now gone, underneath which my father used to store his shotgun shells. Next to the shells was a massive case of baked beans that still exists somewhere in their house, a case so old the labels predate bar-coding. When I was growing up, that case of beans was going to get the family through a nuclear war — I come from a military family, remember. So today I really began to explore the notion that baked beans = safety, and tried to figure out some way of integrating it into my own domestic environment, and it dawned on me that I’d really like to make a sculpture recreating the scene in Ken Russell’s movie “Tommy” where Ann-Margret throws a champagne bottle into a TV set, and soap suds and baked beans come spewing out of the hole. Her character is drunk, and she begins swimming in the baked beans.

Ann-Margret as Nora Walker Hobbs in Ken Russell’s “Tommy,” 1975.

It’s a bizarre and compelling image that crystallizes so many disturbed sides of my youth. To make this image physical and three-dimensional and see it sitting in my living room would, yes, make me feel safe. Art is like that. So now the hunt has begun for a model in Vancouver who has Ann’s signature cheekbones, and that is going to be a very hard model to find. I met Ann several times in 1994 in green rooms across North America. She was on a tour, at the same time as I, with her autobiography, “Ann-Margret: My Story.” It was very glamorous the first time, it was pleasant the second time, and by the third time it was, “Hi. Do you have any gum?” Overlapping tours are common. Once I overlapped with Lynn Redgrave, who made me promise to keep my reading copy of my touring novel inside a Ziploc bag. My most exciting celebrity encounter of all time was in the lobby of a Midwestern ABC affiliate, where a guy sitting across the coffee table from me looked familiar in a didn’t-we-go-to-high-school kind of way — and then it hit me, It’s Jared from the Subway commercials! I’d just done the Subway diet as a summer novelty and had lost five pounds, and he’d just read one of my books, so it was a real love-in. He even had his old 645-inch waist jeans with him.

“CanLit” is a contraction for Canadian Literature, and I’m often asked by writers from other lands, “Doug, what, exactly, is CanLit?” Basically, but not always, CanLit is when the Canadian government pays you money to write about life in small towns and/or the immigration experience. If the book is written in French, urban life is permitted, but only from a nonbourgeois viewpoint.

CanLit was invented in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s — the time when Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister and Canada was busy trying to decolonize itself from mother England and establish a stronger identity of its own. That same era also spawned Montreal’s Expo 1967, plus a wide variety of 16-millimeter films extolling the nation’s natural resources, courtesy of Canada’s National Film Board.

One could say that CanLit is the literary equivalent of representational landscape painting, with small forays into waterfowl depiction and still lifes. It is not a modern art form, nor does it want to be. Scorecards are kept and points are assigned according to how realistically a writer has depicted, say, the odor of the kitchen the narrator inhabited as a child, the sense of disjuncture a character feels at living in a cold northern country with few traditions versus the country he or she has left behind, the quirks and small intimate moments of rural Ontario life or, metaphorically, how well one has painted the feathers on the wings of a duck. CanLit is not a place for writers to experiment, and doesn’t claim to be that kind of place. CanLit is about representing a certain kind of allowed world in a specific kind of way, and most writers in Canada are O.K. with that — or are at least relieved to know the rules of the game from the outset and not have to waste time fostering illusions.Read more…

Yesterday morning I woke up, went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, decided I needed to take my vitamins and then removed two sleeping pills from their prescription vials and downed them with a gulp of tap water. Two seconds later I realized what I’d done, walked to the toilet, stuck my finger down my throat and tried to puke my guts out. Nothing. I’m 44 and I’ve never had to induce vomiting before. The fashion industry makes it sound so easy, but it’s not. In the end nothing came up, and all day long I walked around wondering … What happens next?

Just why, you might ask, do I keep sleeping pills on hand? Three words: European book tours, these current pills being remnants of a June United Kingdom tour.Read more…

In 2000, Mike Howatson, a gifted Vancouver animator, and I produced an illustrated novel called “God Hates Japan.” It was published only in Japanese — beautifully and elegantly, I might add — by Kadokawa Shoten in 2001. It’s the story of characters lost in a malaise that swept Japanese culture after the burst of the bubble economy in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. It also depicted the way some of these characters lived in the shadow of a death cult’s 1995 sarin-gas assault on Tokyo’s subway system.

That same year, an old friend of mine from Japanese business school (I know, it’s as random as it sounds, but I actually have a degree in Japanese business science from the Japanese-American Institute for Management Science, Class of 1986) owned a mobile phone advertising company in Tokyo, so we simultaneously published the book in a digital form that could be read via cell phone. Images from the book became animated and appeared on screen in between chunks of text as readers clicked their way through. It was kind of crazy, and maybe 11 people finished the whole thing (that’s a lot of clicking), but the illustration and themes lent themselves to the format nicely, and it was definitely some kind of first. Forget e-books and all that stuff. My hunch is that it’s all going to go mobile, but that’s eight years in the future and another conversation. And I just know I’m going to wake up one morning, and some putz down in Palo Alto will have invented whatever it is that’s going to replace books. But until then …Read more…

There are maybe five photos of me taken from age 20 to 30. This omission stems from a combination of poverty, youthful hubris and skinniness. Nobody ever believes me when I tell them how skinny I was up until about the age of 32. They always think I’m being coy or posing, and they see a photo and say, “Oh my dear God!”Read more…

On Sept. 11, I was marooned in Madison, Wis., on the first day of a 52-day book tour. On the 12th, I was able to phone through to the Bloomsbury offices in New York’s Flatiron Building. Because a Verizon transmitter on the North Tower had been destroyed, Bloomsbury was able only to receive incoming calls, not to call out. There wasn’t much for the staff to do, really, and my publicist, Sara Mercurio, said that knowing I was out on the road gave them some sort of reason for coming in in the mornings, and this gave me a sense of mission. I’d been ready to pack the whole thing in.

By the fifth day in Madison, I was beginning to think, Hmmm … maybe if I’m stuck here for the rest of my life I could make a go of it. It’s a pretty little town — like TV’s “Happy Days” — nice houses and Mrs. Cunninghams all over the place making endless batches of cookies and cooling them on the ledges of Dutch doors.

On day six, I was able to board one of the first flights allowed back in the air and get to Los Angeles. I had a room at the Raffles L’Ermitage, in Beverly Hills, which had been fully booked for the Emmy Awards that then had been canceled, so the place was empty save for me, Claudia Schiffer and Salman Rushdie. Most of my TV and radio interviews — like much of the press schedule for that tour — was obliterated by the events of the month, and I spent four days on the hotel roof, poolside, looking at the skies over Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades, marveling at how there wasn’t a single jet contrail to be seen (LAX had yet to open). Nor were there helicopters in the skies. Also, crime was down so there were fewer sirens, and I may as well have been sunning on the rooftop of a hotel in the middle of an Indiana cornfield.

Many people think of me as being Mr. High Technology Guy, which I find odd since I’m a fiction writer, possibly one of the lowest-tech jobs going. I’m asked why I don’t get into movies or TV — why should I? I enjoy writing fiction. Without fiction we run the risk of losing forever the possibility of certain kinds of stories being told a certain way. And fiction allows for a time to reflect and savor speech and the gift of language.

And yet there’s something weird with me. My existence annoys the hell out of traditional fiction writers. I get all sorts of corny damnations along the lines of, “All he’s doing is ruthlessly exploiting experimental fiction just to make truckloads of money.” Yes, that’s always been my plan all along. Yessiree, there’s no more surefire way of making a living than by exploiting society’s bottomless craving for experimental fiction. I’m sure if you go to any high school career counseling office, at the absolute bottom of a list of 9,472 possible career options, right below morris dancing and poultry sexing, you’ll find experimental fiction writing. My most recent novel features 24 pages of random numbers. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! I was certainly thinking of the jackpot when I put that in. And yet in it went, and it seems the more experimental my work gets, the more people respond to it.Read more…

American Pop artist James Rosenquist has always been one of my favorite
painters. So when I really got into Photoshop in 1998, I used his
visual techniques as my training guide on how to use this new
software. Using Pop imagery from all over the place I was able to
learn about layering and gradation and cutting and pasting and … in the
end I came to the conclusion that the 1960’s Pop artists were merely
dry runs for year 2000 imaging software. For example, Andy Warhol’s work was about cutting, pasting and cloning, while that of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns was about opacity, layering and filtering.

Included here are some early examples of how I used Pop to learn Photoshop.

Before Sept. 11, my favorite method of making hours melt away on transcontinental flights was to use a pair of terrifyingly sharp German scissors and a few Pritt glue sticks to collage together bits of junk left over from that particular trip — receipts, gum wrappers, flight tags — all the usual detritus of travel. I’d use the resulting collages as cards over the next few months (this was before jpegs, remember) and I now have no idea where most of them are. I did, however save the collages I made in November 1999 on a trip to Japan, and to look at them is to remember the trip in intimate detail. Funny how receipts can do that — shopping for pine bark at Tokyu Hands in Shibuya (easily my favorite place on earth), the ridiculous drive in and out of the city to Narita, or the Guided by Voices song I heard at the Virgin superstore in Shinjuku.

One of the great, sad little haiku moments for most travelers after Sept. 11 was when the cutlery would arrive during a flight and you got a spoon, a fork and … a plastic knife. Two months ago on British Airways in coach class I got a real knife and almost wept. It felt like something — I’m not quite sure what — had healed. It was lovely.

In 2000, I was writer in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Fla. It was a record-breakingly hot summer, and on the nightly news they had a map that showed exactly how much of the state was in flames. It was gripping.

The visual artist in residence was David Carson, someone whose work I’d admired for years. When we met, it turned out we were both children of air force jet pilots who drove silver Audi TTs, and it was slightly creepy. In any event, Florida, for me, was an exotic locale, whereas David grew up just down the Space Coast … which explains his design work in the best kind of way.Read more…

In 2002, Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf asked me to come up with names for 13 dresses they had designed for their fall collection. I decided to do names that were as weird and improbable as the era that was emerging. Viktor and Rolf are stunning designers and they occupy and define that wonderful and improbable yet deeply necessary territory of fashion where complex yet ephemeral ideas emerge and vanish and mutate and re-emerge. People like to think that fashion is silly or frivolous, but people like these are never, well …very fashionable, and they don’t quite understand that culture plays itself out loudly and colorfully and wonderfully on so many other levels than those that finally end up in textbooks 30 years after the fact. Naomi Klein and I disagreed on this point in an essay that appeared in BlackBook Magazine in 2004.Read more…

Every city has one or two companies that provide service to publishers as media escorts. Your typical media escort is named Elaine. Elaine’s two kids just got into good colleges, and Elaine wants to put her arts degree (Kent State, 1978) to some use. Elaine drives a Chevy Lumina, or her husband’s Infiniti; she will not load luggage into her trunk and is always apologetic that the trunk is filled with crap that has to be shunted about and which will also stain your luggage. Elaine pretends to be reading your book and has a Danielle Steele novel on the center console with the bookmark near the end. Elaine enjoys a good stick of gum and keeps a bottle of Purelle within arm’s reach at all times.

Left: Ultraman toy box (modified), Portland, Ore.

Everyone has to ride with Elaine: Al Gore, former second-in-command of the Western world, has to drive with Elaine. Should Al complain, his editors and publishers will tell him how expensive it is to publish a book.

Elaine is used to writers being crotchety, bored and sullen. There’s a part of her that wants to discuss Proust, but there’s a part of her that remembers the time a Pulitzer Prize winner screamed at her to shut up about her daughter’s lacrosse team’s weekend jamboree in Austin. She never knows what to expect from writers. It’s dawning on her that writers are, as a group, pathetic travelers who have found themselves locked inside a gruesome machine called “a tour” which exposes them daily, for weeks on end, to a long strand of physical and emotional indignities.Read more…

About

Douglas Coupland writes about his life as a writer and artist for the last decade and into the near future.